The former cantonal constitutions with their hereditary kings,
or their presiding feudal-oligarchies, continued in the main
to subsist after the conquest, and even the system of clientship,
which made certain cantons dependent on others more powerful,
was not abolished, although no doubt with the loss of political
independence its edge was taken off. The sole object of Caesar
was, while making use of the existing dynastic, feudalist,
and hegemonic divisions, to arrange matters in the interest of Rome,
and to bring everywhere into power the men favourably disposed
to the foreign rule.

Caesar spared no pains to form a Roman party
in Gaul; extensive rewards in money and specially in confiscated
estates were bestowed on his adherents, and places in the common
council and the first offices of state in their cantons
were procured for them by Caesar's influence. Those cantons
in which a sufficiently strong and trustworthy Roman party existed,
such as those of the Remi, the Lingones, the Haedui, were favoured
by the bestowal of a freer communal constitution--the right
of alliance, as it was called--and by preferences in the regulation
of the matter of hegemony.

The national worship and its priests
seem to have been spared by Caesar from the outset as far as possible;
no trace is found in his case of measures such as were adopted
in later times by the Roman rulers against the Druidical system,
and with this is probably connected the fact that his Gallic wars,
so far as we see, do not at all bear the character of religious
warfare after the fashion which formed so prominent a feature
of the Britannic wars subsequently.